By Ileana Marin

We live in a time when many Americans have retreated from politics and public life, and many civic-minded organizations and public leaders seek to reengage them,” Richard Harwood writes in his article “The Engagement Path.” These words could easily have become the succinct motto for what many of us—formally or not so formally affiliated with nongovernmental organizations, universities, and other types of institutes all over the world—are struggling with.

And when I write “many of us,” I have in mind the international network that, simply to have an appropriate denomination, we refer to as the International Civil Society Consortium for Public Deliberation. At last count, this network included 250 international partners representing NGOs, universities, and individuals from Eastern and Central Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Central and South America, Asia, and the United States. Despite its obviously heterogeneous character, this international network, created over a number of years, is very strong.

This expanding group draws strength from a special link, the main thread of which is the body of ideas that stand behind the larger concept of deliberative democracy. The group’s members continuously seek better ways to communicate and collaborate among themselves. It would be wrong to conclude that this network is too loose, given the great encounters that have occurred over the past years.

The Kettering Foundation (KF) has been the more or less “invisible entity” that, in many circumstances, made possible and then perfected this special link. However, through their work, the members from this impressive number of institutions have mingled before and after their connections via KF. Many of them have been using a deliberative democratic approach in their work for a long time. One of the best parts of KF’s role probably has been helping people give a name to the techniques they’ve been using and frame them in a more structured manner. Furthermore, KF has encouraged an appreciation of the contacts they have developed inside a network created, at times, in a rather ad-hoc manner

If I were to go back to Harwood’s article, it would be to note that, commonly, “people reach a critical juncture; their engagement will either move forward, be derailed, or simply get stuck.” The path through this, as many have observed, is to pose and respond to the right probing questions. In my mind, Kettering has continuously been the entity that always tries to pose the right questions. Furthermore, Kettering has, whenever possible and appropriate, offered a space for people—from the United States or other countries—to figure out what it is that they are really talking about and to describe it collectively using their own language, based on their own ideas, beliefs, and experience.

Through years of compiling information for the international newsletters (available, for those interested, on www.icscpd.org), I have had many experiences in gathering information and details on the work of my colleagues and friends from around the world. I learned through my work that, while getting to know people is wonderful and while meeting those who share the same interests is a life-enriching experience, it nonetheless is a great challenge to stay in touch and to keep up to date on both work and other matters. That is probably one of the reasons why many ideas, contacts, and relationships get lost in this big world. Although we do share a lot through our work, and our connections may sometimes be invisible, they nonetheless bring a great deal of joy on one hand, and plenty of interesting and useful knowledge on the other hand.

It continues to be a little difficult for some (particularly our U.S. colleagues at Kettering) to stay in touch with others in the international network, particularly those who come from universities, NGOs, or institutions that are narrowly purposeful and have, for the most part, very practical concerns in communities where needs are clear and sometimes desperate.

It seems that the “message” that stands behind deliberative democracy fits extremely well in those environments the civic or public problem is fundamentally settled; that is, democratic, and even cultivated or middle-class communities. The United States represents the most eloquent example, but in a paradoxical way, even some Eastern-European countries and some of the former Soviet countries fit the description of ordered societies a central or underlying concern is always the greater engagement of citizens in the command of their own lives.

This is what, for instance, one of our Russian colleagues said “I think that this practice (deliberative democracy) is very helpful and useful for the Russian NGOs in the discussion of hot issues, and also for those who believe that effective civil society and democracy require public involvement in the decision-making process. The skills and habits of public participation and initiative are lacking. Due to the absence of a real civic experience under the authoritarian communist regime, people are missing the skills for public dialogue and for reaching common ground on those public-policy issues that concern them. Thus, in my opinion, deliberation is a rightful and successful thing in order to reach this goal.”

That, after all, is the goal of deliberative practice. Reaching that goal must present a particular challenge in societies that have experienced extreme instability or where the problems to be addressed are as basic as access to the immediate necessities of life and social organization itself.

Ileana Marin was a program officer at the time with World Learning for International Development and a Kettering Associate.

This article was published in the Kettering Foundation’s Summer/Fall 2005 Connections.